Henry Spinelli, Chatham Professor Emeritus and Pianist Extraordinaire
Henry Spinelli speaks at the James Laughlin Music Center during Chatham's 2023 alumni weekend.
Before he was a professor at Chatham University, before he toured the nation as a classical pianist, before he was drafted into the Army, Henry Spinelli was a high school student on a bus headed to Pittsburgh for a French competition.
The destination: the little, all-women’s higher education institution then known as Chatham College.
“I shall never forget coming into Pittsburgh on the bus from Greensburg, walking down Woodland Road on a Saturday morning, and it was absolutely idyllic,” he said.
About a decade later, he’d join the faculty as a piano instructor. He’d retire in 1998 after 36 years as a full-time faculty member. During that timespan, he taught generations of women about classical music and performed solo piano in some of the country’s most prestigious venues.
According to Spinelli, it all seemed to fall into his lap. But it came after years of hard work, personal struggles, and practice—hours and hours and hours of practice.
The Piano in the Country Store
Spinelli grew up near Slickville, a mining company town approximately 12 miles north of Greensburg. His family lived in a home adjoining the country store they obtained from a friend, who left behind an old piano. When he was around three years old, Spinelli began to sit at the upright and tap out tunes he’d hear on the radio, sometimes accompanied by his mother’s singing.
“As customers would come in, they’d hear me play,” he said. “I was onstage from those first years, accustomed to playing for people and, literally, showing off.” He cited those early performances as the reason he’s always been comfortable playing in front of crowds.
As he grew up, Spinelli played in local competitions. At one sponsored by the Lions Club, he won a gold watch. Another awarded him a cash prize that allowed him to buy his first grand piano after the old one was returned to its prior owner.
He started lessons with his first real piano teacher in his junior year of high school in Greensburg. She prepared him for his audition at Carnegie Tech with a repertoire of contemporary music and classical music of Western Europe.
Once at Carnegie Tech, Spinelli began studying solo piano. His most influential teacher was Eunice Norton, an accomplished pianist who helped Spinelli improve his technique. She also brought Spinelli into her chamber music group for young musicians and helped launch his professional career when her husband arranged for him to play a recital at the Stephen Foster Memorial in Oakland. He was paid $500.
From Western Pennsylvania to Western Europe
A clipping from an April 1956 edition of The Pittsburgh Press. The article promotes Spinelli and other Pittsburgh-area musicians before a performance at a Mozart music festival.
It was after he completed college that Spinelli was drafted. He was told he was being sent to Munich, Germany. Naturally, Spinelli sought a spot in the Army band, but when he met with an Army official in New Jersey, he was told there was no spot for a pianist.
“Well,” the official said, “why don’t you go to Munich anyhow, because the beer is great!’” Spinelli arrived there in the winter of 1956, and he became the company clerk.
He was placed in a private room with a parquet floor. From his window, he could see the snow-capped Bavarian alps. In his free time, he practiced and learned pieces on a rented grand piano. He also made trips to the opera, ballet, and concerts.
The culture of the city was flourishing, but scars of the Second World War remained. They were a shocking sight to Spinelli, who, like many Americans, hadn’t until then grasped the scale of destruction in Europe.
“There were huge mounds of earth in the city—but the culture revived so resiliently and spontaneously,” he said.
Over the next year and a half, he embarked on a “cultural tour” of Europe with the Army and its band. He took the train to Berlin and saw the philharmonic orchestra. He walked in Berchtesgaden and looked up at the Kehlstein mountain, where the Nazi-built “Eagle’s Nest” peered over the valley. In Vienna, he roamed the streets where Schubert once strolled. He drank wine in Grinzing, where Beethoven had lived.
“It was inspiring beyond belief,” Spinelli said. After he was honorably discharged, Spinelli made his way back home to Western Pennsylvania. Conscription had turned out to be something of a blessing. Coming home, however, would bring a new set of challenges.
Returning to Pittsburgh—and Chatham
Henry Spinelli instructs a piano student in the James Laughlin Music Center in the 1980s. (Chatham University Archives and Special Collections)
Why did Spinelli come back to Pittsburgh after seeing so much of what the world had to offer?
“I had no options,” he said. “I had no job. I was still unformed as a concert artist. I was not qualified to explore the possibility of management in New York as a solo pianist.”
Spinelli moved back in with his parents and practiced piano “somewhat halfheartedly.” Even with all the positive experiences he had overseas, he still felt the Army had eroded his sense of individualism. The psychological impact was palpable.
There was never before a question in his or his family’s minds that Spinelli was destined to be a professional musician. Now, he wondered for the first time: What am I going to do? “I was really in a bad place,” he said. It was a dark mood that lasted three years.
One day, his old teacher, Eunice Norton, told him that she and her husband were moving a piano to their country home in Bear Rocks, near Ligonier. The piano would arrive two weeks before Norton and her husband, so she offered Spinelli the chance to go there and practice two new pieces in the interim.
Alone and surrounded by the natural beauty of the Laurel Highlands, Spinelli began his study of Charles Ives’ Piano Sonata No. 2, otherwise known as the Concord Sonata. Its four movements are named after transcendentalist writers who praised the goodness of nature and the purity of the individual.
“It was a shot of adrenaline,” Spinelli said. “I was absolutely obsessed with the piece. It was the most challenging music I had ever encountered.”
Sometime after he returned home, Norton told him about a job opening at Chatham College and offered herself as a reference. He began as a piano instructor. Later, he asked the president to join the faculty. His contract included giving 20 hours of piano lessons a week, performing four recitals a year, and providing classroom instruction in a course on the arts—the latter piece including giving lectures and tutorials, as well as reading papers and examining senior theses.
He took the job “not really knowing how overwhelming that would be,” Spinelli said. “It was very demanding, especially the reading of the papers.”
But it was also a privilege, he said. In his courses, he took students to cathedrals and concert halls around Pittsburgh to hear live music in various spaces. They traveled to Kenyon College in Ohio to see an exhibition of historic pianos. As curator of the Chatham concert series, he booked composers and soloists at the college, putting an emphasis on bringing outstanding female musicians to the campus.
During that time, he also fulfilled his goal of becoming a solo concert pianist. In 1966, after playing with a chamber group at Carnegie Hall in New York, Spinelli was set for his solo debut at The Town Hall of New York University. The New York Times called his performance of Ives’ Sonata “triumphant.”
It was “a stunning performance, completely knowledgable, absolutely concentrated. It drew well-deserved bravos,” the Times wrote.
He went on to play at the Boston Conservatory, the University of Central Florida, and San Jose University of California, among other venues. Critics and audiences alike responded positively to his performances of Concord Sonata. It became one of Spinelli’s signature pieces as a concert pianist.
“When I finally got into music again, it all returned,” he said. “I was just a born ham, I must say, [as a] public performer. I loved to be on stage, and I loved to have all of the accolades that came with that.”
Spinelli retired from Chatham in 1998. The trustees honored him as a “distinguished artist in our midst, a beacon of elegance, and a master teacher and scholar.”
He remembered two students as outstanding: Cheryl Hardwick-Moore ’66, who was the director of the Saturday Night Live band and worked on Broadway, and Mary Belle Bullwinkle ’69, who joined the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, CA.
But there were many others who went on to lead lives full of music, too. He recalled seeing some of them at the 2023 alumni reunion: “I thought, these people were really special to have grown up at that time and receive the education that Chatham gave to them at that time, which was thoroughly a liberal arts education.”
Since retiring, Spinelli has also become a notable donor to Chatham, helping keep that liberal arts education alive, as well as keeping the pianos in good shape.
“The privilege of working at Chatham College, that beautiful place on the hill—everyone that I knew would just marvel at what had fallen into my lap,” he said. “I couldn’t say any more.”